Electrical power converters, in particular DC-DC power converters, are widely used because of their high efficiency and small size. Among them, multiphase DC-DC power converters are particularly well suited for providing high currents at low voltages, as this is needed by highly integrated electronic components such as microprocessors, graphic processors, network processors, etc.
In a general manner, a multiphase power converter typically includes several converter branches which are called phases. The phases are connected in parallel for supplying a common load with respective phase currents. Thus, the output current which is supplied by the multiphase converter to the load is the sum of the phase currents. Any electrical power converter can be considered as comprising at least one phase, thus including single-phase power converters and multiphase power converters.
A single-phase power converter or each phase of a multiphase converter can be controlled via a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) regulator. In general, the PID controller controls the operations of switching devices that are arranged for supplying electrical charge or current to an energy tank circuit, i.e. a capacitor or an inductor, as well as for allowing the phase output current to flow from this energy tank to the load. kp-, ki- and kd-coefficients which are implemented in the PID regulator are selected for producing the desired values for the output current and output voltage. Then, it is also known to adjust in real time respective values of the kp-, ki- and kd-coefficients of each PID regulator as a function of values of, e.g., an input current and/or an input voltage of the converter, and also the values of the converter output current and/or output voltage.
Depending on a respective power converter design, the regulator used for controlling the operation of each phase may be of PID-type as just mentioned, but alternatively of any other type, including proportional type only, integral type, derivative type, any combination such as proportional-integral, integral-derivative and proportional-derivative, regulators which implement at least one higher order component for controlling the power conversion, delta-regulators, delta-sigma regulators, differential regulators, etc.
Recent generations of processors such as CPUs or GPUs have power-saving functions that causes power supply demand to vary over time in an unpredictable manner. In such an instance, a respective DC-DC power converter needs to perform well for a large variety of load profiles. In particular, such power converters have to meet stable regulation requirements over a wide output range and also meet specifications about transient load profiles, including short transition times and large load steps. Similar requirements apply to power converters used for power-supplying circuits which have power demands that vary randomly over time, such as VR controllers.
In addition, passive components such as output capacitors and inductors may exhibit significant variations which also need to be taken into account for optimizing the operation of a power converter. Such variations may relate to deviations with respect to target component values as resulting from the manufacture of each component, or may be due to aging of each component. But such variations may not be known initially when designing the adjustments of parameters that are implemented in the regulator of the power converter, such as kp-, ki- and kd-coefficients in case of a PID regulator.